Lester young autobiography

A Danish musician here presents the most accurate, comprehensive work on a major figure in American jazz: Lester Willis Young (1909-1959), better known as.
The book recounts Young's musical career from its beginnings, through his years with the Count Basie Orchestra, and up to his death in 1959.
Historian Frank Buchmann-Moller crafts a full length biography exclusively for Lester Young fans focusing on Young's philosophy of life, his exceptional ability.

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It would be hard to imagine Lester Young being anything except a jazz musician. He was extremely shy, and he created an insular universe to protect himself from the cruelties of the outside world. He was only comfortable around black jazz musicians, and he devised a secret language filled with code phrases that few could fully comprehend. He is credited with the phrase “tell your story” as a metaphor for jazz improvisation, and it seems that the only time Young was an extrovert was when he used his horn and told his own story. More than any other jazz musician, Young’s solos were emotionally transparent. It was easy to tell if Young was elated, combative, depressed or just uninspired. It would seem that the most logical approach to Lester Young’s life and music would be to discuss them together. However, none of the existing biographies of Young (save the one under review here) have taken that approach. Dave Gelly’s slim but informative biography, “Being Prez: The Life and Music of Lester Young” (published in North America by Oxford, and elsewhere by Equinox) makes the essential c

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Lester Young

Praise for Lester Young:

". . . a schematic of unparalleled insight and detail."
---Down Beat

"A monumental work."
---Dizzy Gillespie

". . . a major contribution to jazz scholarship . . . for its illumination of Lester Young's music and for setting the biographical record straight."
---Dan Morgenstern

Several new biographies of Lester Young have been published in the years since Lewis Porter's Lester Young first appeared, but none have supplanted or even attempted the in-depth study that Porter brings to his subject's music. With the same care and scholarship that characterized his John Coltrane, Porter analyzes the music that made Lester Young "the most original tenor sax in jazz."

In addition to helping us understand Lester Young's playing and stylistic evolution, Porter's analysis demonstrates that Young's playing at the end of his career did not mark a serious decline over his earlier style, as many critics have claimed.

Lewis Porter is Professor of Music and director of the M.A. Program in Jazz History and

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The Life and Music of Lester Young

Writer and Journalist

Dave Gelly writes about jazz in The Observer and other newspapers and journals. He has written and presented many features for BBC radio and hosted a weekly Radio Two show. He was a leading writer on the Sony Award-winning ten-part BBC radio series Sinatra: Voice of the Century and is the author of several books, including Masters of the Jazz Saxophone (Miller Freeman, 2000) and Stan Getz: Nobody Else but Me (Backbeat 2002). He was named Jazz Writer of the Year in the 1999 British Jazz Awards. Dave Gelly was appointed MBE in the 2005 New Years Honours.

PAPERBACK PUBLISHED MAY 2009

Named as One of The Observer Music Monthly’s Best Books for 2007

Lester Young (1909-1959) was one of the great jazz masters, whose tenor saxophone playing brought new levels of expressiveness and subtlety to the jazz language. Many of his recordings – with Billie Holiday, as a member of Count Basie’s band, and under his own name – are numbered among the finest examples of the art. A complicated, vulnerable, g